As market demand increases for integrated circuit (IC) products such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, and as IC die sizes shrink, high assembly throughput rates for very small die and low production costs are crucial in providing commercially-viable products. For example, the cost of an RFID device still depends on assembly complexity.
Conventional methods for assembling IC products include pick and place techniques. Such techniques involve a manipulator, such as a robot arm, to remove IC dies from a wafer and place them into a die carrier. The dies are subsequently mounted onto a substrate with other electronic components, such as antennas, capacitors, resistors, and inductors to form an electronic device. However, these techniques have drawbacks and disadvantages. For example, the pick and place techniques involve complex robotic components and control systems that handle only one die at a time. In addition, pick and place techniques have limited placement accuracy, and have a minimum die size requirement.
Thus, there is a need to overcome these and other problems of the prior art and to provide controllable methods for a scalable and low cost assembly in transferring and assembling electronic device elements with chip substrates.